Elvis Presley – Elvis Presley!

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This post is the third post of my new series based on the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die by Robert Dimery.

In this series I’m going to be looking through the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die and commenting on the albums featured, telling you about albums I think should have been featured, artists that should have been featured too and just anything else I feel like commenting on!

This isn’t a sponsored series but if you’d like to read the book with me I’ll put a link at the bottom of this post to where you can buy it. This series is just something I wanted to do because I’d been reading the book and found that I had a lot of opinions!

Every Tuesday and Thursday I’m going to take one album from the front of the book starting in 1950s and one album from the back of the book starting in 2000’s, I’ll give you a bit of the albums history, the track list and of course my thoughts on the album!

In this post we’re going to be talking about Elvis Presley – Elvis Presley!

As this album is available on Spotify I’ll put a player below this paragraph so that if you’d like to listen along whilst you read the rest of this post you can!

The album Elvis Presley was released in 1956 by RCA, the producer is uncredited, the art director is William V Robertson its run time is 28:42.

This isn’t an album I have in my personal collection because the only copies of it I’ve found have been absolutely extortionate prices and I can’t justify paying them, I think the last one I saw was almost £500!

I have listened to the vinyl version of this album though and it’s gloriously imperfect and in fact I’m listening to it on Spotify as I write this and that is equally imperfect! It’s the debut studio album by Elvis Presley, it’s a bunch of different studio sessions pieced together into a 12 track album.

Some of the tracks are leftovers from the Sam Phillips Sun Records days back in 1954, one of these tracks is I’ll Never Let You Go (Little Darlin’) when talking about this album the book makes a comment about this particular track and it’s something I’ve been saying for YEARS about the entire album so seeing it in print, written by a stranger was weirdly validating.

The comment is this ‘The overwrought vocal on the Sun take of I’ll Never Let You Go (Little Darlin’) verges on self-parody the irony is that Elvis had no public self-image to mock at that point.’

It’s so true! I feel like this entire album sounds like a dare I say it bad impression of Elvis, I feel like I’ve just committed some sort of cardinal sin by saying this but it’s true, I adore Elvis but this album? Not so much.

At the same time though this album is glorious though because it’s the first ever studio album by Elvis Presley the King of Rock n Roll!

My favourite tracks are Blue Suede Shoes, I Got A Woman and I Love You Because.

Honestly though I think if you’re just discovering Elvis you can probably skip this album, it isn’t his best.

But the question I have to answer is do I think this album should be on the list of 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die?

I’m torn honestly, but I think it just about makes it to the list for me because it’s Elvis’ first album which is a really iconic part of music history because this album is the start of it all.

Plus, the photo on the album sleeve is amazing and is probably one of the most notable / recognised photos of Elvis shot by William V Robertson on July 31st 1955 at a concert in Florida. The Clash obviously loved this album cover because they replicated it for their London Calling album!

Image Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Calling

That’s it for this post from my new series based on the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die! As I said at the beginning of this post this isn’t in anyway a sponsored series but if you’d like to buy the book so you can read along with me then click here for the link to purchase from Waterstones if you live in the UK and click here for the Amazon link if you’re in the rest of the world.

Those aren’t affiliate links; I just want to make sure you guys know where to buy the book if you want to read along too!

If you would like to read any of the posts from this series then you can find them all by clicking here!